by Fannie Flagg
Our first customer was Herbert Holk. We about scared him to death. He squashed the eyeball and almost ruined it. After he got out, I told Michael when he made his chewing and spitting noises, not to spit on the customers because it was not sanitary. And I added to my speech, “BE CAREFUL NOT TO SQUEEZE THE EYEBALL.” Michael looked scary because he went bobbing for apples with his eyepatch on and the black dye was all over one side of his face.
Our next customers went better. You should have seen their faces when I screamed at them at the end. We had a lot of customers, but we had to stop for an intermission because the blood got cold.
When I told Amy Jo Snipes we were ready to resume business, Michael, who was in charge of heating up the heart, got the liver so hot he dropped it. Vernon Mooseburger got cheated, and I like him. It took us forever to find that piece of liver. Have you ever tried to find a piece of liver in the dark? Then guess who our next customer was? I near about died. It was Mrs. Underwood. I was nervous and my voice didn’t do right. And by that time the snake had turned into only one wiener—the rest had fallen off—and the witches’ moles had all stuck together. I hope she didn’t notice. She acted real scared, but I know she wasn’t. And when Michael tried to pull the blindfold off, he couldn’t reach her and he botched it up and she had to take it off herself. It ruined my timing, so I just said, “BOO.” She must think I’m dumb.
Customers kept coming like sheep to the slaughter. One girl peed when I shined the flashlight on my face and screamed at her. I was getting worried, so I went to the edge of the entrance and said to the hostess, “Where is the Good Fairy?”
“The Good Fairy isn’t coming,” she said in her hostess voice. “Why not?” I said. She said, “I don’t know. Your next customer is ready, Madame Bodini.” I said, “Get in here.” She said, “What?” and I said, “Get in here.” Then I heard her say, “Wait here, I must go into the HOUSE OF BLOOD AND GUTS … ENTER IF YOU MUST for a talk with Madame Bodini.” I forgot she didn’t know my Madame Bodini face and she jumped three feet when she saw me. I told her to go and find out why the Good Fairy wasn’t coming. And I told her it’s the HALL OF BLOOD AND GUTS … ENTER IF YOU DARE, NOT ENTER IF YOU MUST.
She came back a few minutes later to say that the Good Fairy thought the whole thing was silly and childish and all a fake. She wasn’t going to let two idiots get tomato soup on her specially made Good Fairy costume. I instructed the hostess to go back out and tell her we would skip the soup, but if she didn’t get in there, I would tell Mrs. Underwood she had cheated on her arithmetic test, which she hadn’t, she is as smart as a whip. Even so, Kay Bob Benson knows I am Mrs. Underwood’s favorite and she might believe me. Pretty soon the hostess called out, “Here comes the Good Fairy now,” and in she came. I WAS READY FOR HER.
The first thing she said was, “Daisy Fay Harper, your daddy’s a no-good, two-timing drunk and you’re nothing but a beach rat and if you so much as get one drop of anything on me, my mother will see you pay for it.” We made her feel the hump and when we handed her the heart of the dead child, just recently killed she acted like she was bored with the whole thing. She said, “That’s nothing but a piece of liver.” We skipped the bucket of blood; I am a person of my word. With the dead rat, she said, “That’s nothing but a rabbit’s-foot key chain. I can feel the chain.” We should have taken that chain off. And as she held the eyeball, she said, “This is a grape.” She was batting 1000 so far.
I said, “YOU ARE WALKING BY THE SPIDER WEB OF THE THREE-FOOT SPIDER, WHO, AS I SPEAK, IS WALKING ON YOUR ARM LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO BITE YOU.” She didn’t even let me finish.
She said, “It is not. This is a hairnet and that’s some old piece of fur.” She would make a great blind person.
I skipped the witches’ moles; she was enjoying guessing everything too much. She got the wiener right and when she got to the bowl full of guts and veins, she said, “This is macaroni and cheese.”
I said, “That’s right, Good Fairy,” even though it was spaghetti. Then I said, “GET READY FOR THE ULTIMATE, ULTIMATE SUPERHORROR OF ALL TIMES … A HANDFUL OF WORMS AND MAGGOTS TAKEN OUT OF THE STOMACH OF A DEAD PERSON THAT HAS JUST DIED OF THE BLACK PLAGUE … AND IT IS VERY CONTAGIOUS.” “This is just more macaroni and cheese,” she said. I said, “Madame Bodini and her faithful hunchback assistant beg to differ with the Good Fairy.” She stomped her foot and said, “You’re not fooling me. It is macaroni and cheese just cut up in smaller pieces. I ought to know, I eat enough of it.” That was true. They are very big on macaroni and cheese at the school cafeteria.
I said, “Madame Bodini bets the Good Fairy five dollars that it isn’t macaroni and cheese.” Then she got mad and pulled her blindfold off and by that time those worms and maggots I had gotten from Peachy Wigham had crawled halfway up her arm.
You never heard anyone scream so loud. She tore down the whole side of the HALL OF BLOOD AND GUTS … ENTER IF YOU DARE running out of there. Madame Bodini closed for the night. All I can say is I got the worms and maggots from Peachy Wigham on special order and if you remember, she owns the colored mortuary.
November 4, 1952
In the “Dashes from Dot” column today, it said, “The hit of Mrs. Underwood’s sixth-grade Halloween party was a horror show put on by Jr. Debutante Daisy Fay Harper and little Michael Romeo. It was so good and scary that one little girl was seen running, screaming in terror, from the booth. Congratulations on a job well done!”
Guess who’s not speaking to me? Even Mrs. Underwood said Kay Bob Benson is too emotional for her age.
Momma is angry at Daddy again because he doesn’t have enough money to pay that note coming up on the fifteenth. She said to me, “Ask your father where are his drinking friends now?” Al the Drummer was gone. Jimmy Snow lost all the money he had playing poker with the Pistal brothers and when Daddy went to Billy Bundy, the radio preacher, to borrow some money, he just quoted him a speech. “Neither a borrower or a lender be.”
Daddy said, “They find something from the Bible to fit every occasion, don’t they?”
Momma says, tell your father this or tell your father that, when we are all in the same room. I have to say, “Daddy, Momma says this or Momma says that.” They are driving me crazy!
Mr. Curtis Honeywell and his all-girl army got new camouflage uniforms for guerrilla fighting. They are green, spotted, baggy shirts and pants and a helmet with a net on it to match. I didn’t want to poke my nose in, but it seems to me if they are going to do most of their fighting on the beach, they would be better off wearing white. You can’t see anything white on the beach. I know; I was over at Michael’s house one day and my mother called me to come home and get my Spanish mackerel. I took off running as fast as I could behind the cottages and all of a sudden I flipped up in the air and did a complete somersault and landed like a ton of bricks flat on my back. I was so surprised at being on the ground I just laid there. It was a puzzle to me until I looked up and saw Mr. Romeo’s white rubber clothesline. I was running so fast I didn’t see the clothesline and it caught me under the chin and flipped me over. Momma is going to get my eyes checked.
Mrs. Dot is driving all the Jr. Debuantes and Michael, who is an honorary Jr. Debutante, and Angel Pistal to a town called Daphne to the Rainbow Roller Skating Rink that has a real live organist. Her name is Princess White Cloud and she has a Hunkpapa Sioux father and a Chippewa mother and she is billed as the Most Musically Accomplished American Indian in Public Life Today. It says that she has played the organ in Broadway theaters all over the country. I wish she was a Blackfoot Indian. I would give anything to see a Blackfoot Indian in person, almost as much as I would give to see an albino. I’ve never seen a Chinese person or an Eskimo or a person from Lapland, the Land of the Midnight Sun. I have never seen snow and the people in Lapland have it all year round. I have a glass paperweight that has a house in it and when you shake it up, it snows. I could just look at that thing for hours!
Wouldn’t it be great if I could grow up
and marry Johnny Sheffield, who plays Bomba the Jungle Boy, and go to live in Lapland? I would keep a Christmas tree up all year round and Momma and Daddy and Mrs. Underwood and maybe Jimmy Snow could come and visit on holidays. I would have to get across the ocean first. There are some big boats that go all the time because Mrs. Dot’s sister got molested on one once. Mrs. Dot said her sister didn’t feel so bad when it happened because she thought it had been a foreign man and you know how they are. But when they caught the man and he spoke English and turned out to be a used car salesman from Wheeling, West Virginia, she had a complete and total nervous breakdown and won’t ride in a boat to this day.
November 8, 1952
Tommie Jo, the girl who married Hank Turner, called Daddy on the phone just crying her eyes out. She said Hank had gone out to the store and hadn’t come back for three days. They hadn’t had a fight or anything, and there is no trace of him at all. Daddy called the long-distance operator in Minnesota and got the number of a Mrs. H. Turner. When she answered the phone, she said yes, she had a son named Hank, but she had not seen him in six years and they had been looking for him because he had a wife and children in Minnesota, too. He had never gone to the University of Minnesota and didn’t have a brother. Hank had been in a bad accident and has a steel plate in his head and she thinks that is why he forgets to go home and forgets that he is married and has children. I never saw a steel plate in his head.
Tommie Jo is having a fit because he took her car with him and she is pregnant. When Granddaddy Pettibone left, he did it on purpose, but Hank is so sweet I know he didn’t mean to. Momma hopes he doesn’t get somewhere and forget again and marry some other woman.
Mrs. Dot took us to the Rainbow Roller Rink the other night and we had a great time. Princess White Cloud, the organist, was sitting out there in the middle of the rink in an Indian dress and a feather bonnet, playing up a storm. I wore blue jeans, but Kay Bob Benson showed up with a whole skating outfit and her own skates with blue pompoms. She can skate backwards, wouldn’t you know it. I can hardly skate forwards and Angel can’t skate at all. Mrs. Dot pulled her around the rink. We had to do a sweetheart skate. Michael and I fell down about eight times. Kay Bob Benson and Amy Jo Snipes didn’t fall once. She would stick her nose up in the air every time they went past us. We were usually on the floor. On top of that, she went and told the manager there were two children out on the rink that were hazardous to the other skaters. At one time in my life I thought I might grow up and be an ice skater like Sonja Henie, but I have changed my mind. If it’s so hard to skate on wheels, imagine how hard it would be to skate on ice. I admire Sonja Henie even more than Esther Williams, who I heard has plastic hair.
The Jr. Debutantes missed the circus completely because Mrs. Dot is scared to death of elephants. This fear comes from when her second cousin parked her red Studebaker in front of the library while she was in looking up her family tree. When she came out at six o’clock, the whole front of the car was smashed to the ground. Some men who were standing there were with the circus and told her that this elephant named Judy had walked by and, before they could stop her, had just sat down on the car. In her act she used to sit on a red stool and put her feet up in the air and when she saw the red car, she got confused and thought it was her stool. Mrs. Dot’s cousin made those men go home with her because she said her husband never would have believed that an elephant sat on her car. But we are going to get to go to the Harwin County Fair and Agriculture Show that is coming up pretty soon. They don’t have any elephants, just cows.
November 10, 1952
You will never believe what has happened. Harper’s Malt Shop has burned to the ground. I am homeless. Daddy is having a fit because the insurance is not half as much as he thought it would be.
A week ago Momma and I were up at Buddy’s Café having dinner. I got tired of sitting around waiting on Momma to smoke her cigarettes and drink her hundred cups of coffee, so I left and started over to Michael’s when I saw smoke coming out of the wooden shack on the side of the malt shop. A whole bunch of rags that smelled like gasoline were starting to burn. I grabbed a bucket that was in there, ran outside and filled it full of sand about four or five times. The fire was almost out and I was hollering for my daddy and when he got around to the side of the house and saw what I was doing, instead of being proud of me, he yelled at me to go over to Michael’s and he’d take care of the rest.
Michael and I were playing old maid and just when I was sure Michael was going to be the old maid, some men ran up and started banging on the door and yelling, “Harper’s is on fire.” I sat there for a minute before it dawned on me that I was a Harper. I ran out the door and sure enough, our place was burning again as big as you please. Daddy was sitting across the street, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and everyone else was running around like chickens with their heads cut off. A few minutes later Momma came home from Buddy’s and when she saw what was happening, she sat down in the road and started crying about her silver fox fur. I was so excited about her silver fox fur I forgot about Felix. As soon as I thought of her, I took off, no matter what Momma said. I started calling her and calling her and pretty soon I heard Felix meow from under the house. I crawled under there as fast as I could and grabbed her. It’s a good thing the malt shop had shifted up on that side. Some men in the house were throwing stuff out the window, so I ran up and asked them to get my birth certificate and my baby pictures that were in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Those men wouldn’t listen to me at all. I told them over and over I needed those pictures for This Is Your Life, but all they saved was the television set, which they broke when they threw it out the window, and a mattress and some sheets and pillowcases.
Men that try to act like heroes and use their brute force on little children sure are stupid. Our car would have burned up, too, but Michael, who is only twelve, got in it and backed it away. I climbed in with him and noticed some of my school books in the car, so I took them out and threw them in the fire. I figured it would save me from doing a lot of homework, but unfortunately under the headline in the paper the next day that said HARPER’S MALT SHOP BURNS TO THE GROUND IN TRAGIC FIRE it also said that seen throwing her school books in the fire was little Daisy Fay Harper. Rat’s foot! No wonder Hollywood stars hate reporters, and after all that some busybody do-gooder has already bought me a new set of books.
We lost everything we owned, including all the animals in the freezer, but Daddy and I try to look on the bright side of things. All those blue skirts and white blouses burned up and what was left of those Spanish mackerels. Thank goodness I was wearing my jeans and my red and white flannel shirt I like so much. A friend of Momma’s and Daddy’s named Mr. White who has some cottages down on the beach let us stay in one for a while, so that’s where we are living. About a day or so after the fire Daddy took me out to the car and opened the trunk and said, “Well, look what just happens to be in the trunk.” It was my tin box of private papers with the combination lock, my sweetheart pillow and that stuffed bobcat. All I can say is that I am sorry that my birth certificate and my baby pictures didn’t just happen to be in that trunk. Momma is furious her silver fox fur and her alligator purse weren’t in the trunk either.
She is not speaking to Daddy at all again. According to her, Daddy is a “stupid son of a bitch from hell without the good sense God gave a pig.” If she ever finds out the fire was his fault, she will kill him for sure, especially when she knows what we’re getting from the insurance company.
The day after the fire Daddy sent me to where the malt shop had been to wait for the insurance man. I had to stand up the whole time because the sand was still so hot you couldn’t sit down. A lot of people from Magnolia Springs came to see the ruins and Kay Bob Benson had the woman who works for her mother bring her. She parked right in front of our place and just sat and laughed. When I told Momma on her, she said not to worry, every dog has its day. Mrs. Dot came and cried and cried. She said she couldn’t believe that this ter
rible tragedy had befallen one of her Jr. Debutantes. She took it harder than anyone and devoted her entire “Dashes from Dot” column to us. She said that I was the bravest soul, standing on the disaster site the next day, like a good little soldier waiting for the insurance man, my little chin held high trying not to cry. I never did think about crying, I was too happy over those white shirts and blue skirts burning, not to mention the Spanish mackerel, but it made a good story.
Everybody is being real sweet and Michael’s mother made him give me a pair of his blue jeans and a shirt. Boys’ blue jeans are the best. People are trying to give us a lot of things, but Momma won’t take hardly anything. She is too proud to accept charity. I think she ought to wait and see what people offer and then make up her mind. When I told her it would be a terrific time to go on Queen for a Day because she had a great sad story, she started to bawl. She and Mrs. Dot ought to have a crying contest. My mother doesn’t know this, but I am going to get a job as soon as I finish the sixth grade and buy her a brand-new silver fox fur that is not worn out on the elbows. Boy, I can’t wait to see her face and if I can make enough money, I will get her an alligator purse, too.
November 14, 1952
Momma left today to go live with her sister in Virginia. She told me she just couldn’t stay with Daddy anymore and when I get older, I would understand. She wanted me to go with her. I love my mother very much, but I can’t see leaving my daddy. Besides, I am having too good a time in the sixth grade. Mrs. Underwood is reading us Nancy Drew and the Clue in the Crumbling Wall. I am very interested to see how this one turns out. Boy, one chapter at a time can sure make a nervous wreck out of you. When Momma left, she didn’t even have a bag to pack or anything to put in it. Mrs. Dot picked her up and took her to Magnolia Springs to catch the Greyhound bus. She’ll come back, she always does. She made me promise to write her every week and if Daddy gets in jail, I’m to go up to Mrs. Dot’s house.